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Even so, one suspects that her modernity lay not so much in her dalliances with naturalism as her contentedness with the present, with the life at hand. The economic affluence of her family situation, and the ready access to the intellectual and cultural currents of the day, undoubtedly formed part of that contentedness. But so did an underlying sense that the world at hand simply filled life's most fundamental needs: "I find ecstasy in living—the mere sense of living is joy enough." Under the circumstances there was no need, really, of an afterlife: "If roses had not faded … there were no need of other Heaven than the one below … and if God had been here this summer, and seen the things that I have seen—I guess that He would think His Paradise superfluous."
Complicating this picture of a mind stretched between Victorian romanticism and modern realism was Dickinson's complex attitude toward the historic Christian tradition. At times she seemed skeptical of the whole business. As a Mt. Holyoke student she approached but never managed to cross the threshold of conversion, classing herself with the small minority of "No-Hopers." As an adult she gradually gave up attending church, gradually disassociated herself from meaningful involvement in her family's daily devotions, gradually jettisoned the main tenets of her forebears' Calvinism. In time, prayer too seemed to be more about resignation than affirmation. Indeed, that was hardly the bottom of it, for often enough Dickinson's God presented himself, if at all, as deceitful. He offered tender mercies with one hand and bitter disappointments with the other. Even the glories of June proved illusory; "old sophistries," she would call them.
Yet Lundin finds too much evidence of spiritual passion and theological concern to say that Dickinson ever definitively renounced Christian faith. The poet longed to believe that suffering betokened more than itself—though she displayed a Lutheran-like sensibility that human frailty invariably compromises all aspirations. Jesus emerged as a trustworthy friend, an example of human suffering—though neither an atoning redeemer nor an expression of human infinitude. She was an avid Bible reader, quoting 38 biblical books at different times and places—though typically holding Scripture at arm's length as a text to be parodied as well as revered. And despite her sardonic skepticism, she remained convinced that our maker would somehow preserve and transform our lives beyond the grave—though she remained chary of making hard and fast affirmations about the afterlife.
But perhaps such ambivalence was the point of it all: "Too much of Proof affronts Belief," Dickinson would write. Art was her chosen arena for wrestling with some of the most troubling questions of modern thought; it gave her unfettered freedom to play out her uncertainties: "I dwell in Possibility— / A fairer House than Prose— / More numerous of Windows— / Superior—for Doors." An exhilarating vision it was—a vision of life suspended in midair between the poles of orthodoxy and settled atheism. "On subjects of which we know nothing," she wrote, "or should I say Beings … we both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble."
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